


Treading Unknown Ground

by shayera



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestor-Era, Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-20
Updated: 2011-08-20
Packaged: 2017-10-22 20:47:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/242414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shayera/pseuds/shayera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Dolorosa does something that no troll has ever done before. She raises a child. It's hard and nobody understands.</p><p>In fact, it's more confusing and more amazing than she could ever have imagined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Treading Unknown Ground

When she first made her life-changing decision, the Dolorosa was convinced that keeping the child hidden would be the only difficult part. Raising it would surely present no challenge. All she needed to do was to act like a replacement lusus and keep it fed and protected, and the rest would take care of itself. Troll children could hardly be high maintenance - just because it was unheard of didn't mean that a troll couldn't raise one as well as a lusus if she needed to.

By the time the grub she saved pupated she had prepared a safe hideout hive in a remote valley, and she was full of confidence. She quite looked forward to seeing what kind of a troll the little red grub would grow into.

It all became much more confusing once she actually met the child.

Watching the pupa hatch was strangely exciting. She might be the first adult troll to witness such a thing in hundreds of thousands of sweeps, perhaps the first ever. Tiny arms emerged first, ripping frantically at the cocoon until the head was free. Small yellow eyes blinked at the indoor light, seeing it for the first time after metamorphosis. His horns were short and blunt, just like the grub's had been. His face was chubby, and his body proportions were extremely squat – almost as if his head was too big for his body – but the Dolorosa was as good as certain that that was normal for a newly wriggled child. She was relieved to see that at least he didn't seem hideously mutated. It was probably just the blood.

The child didn't seem to notice her presence at first, being preoccupied with getting the sticky remains of the cocoon off him. She watched him in silence until he was finally rid of enough to start paying attention to his surroundings. It didn't take all that long. As soon as the child raised his head his eyes met hers – and his little face scrunched up in fear. He poised himself as if trying to decide whether to advance or abscond, and the Dolorosa wasn't surprised. Normally, a newly wriggled child would face the cavern of trials, and strength and survival instinct was all they had to keep them alive until they emerged and was greeted by their lusus.

In this case, though, no strength or survival instinct in the world would have been enough to save him if his blood color had been exposed. He might look normal on the outside, but had he been in the caverns any slight scratch of his skin would have sent the culling droids running. She couldn't risk it if she wanted him to live.

So there would be no trials for him today. She hoped their lack at this critical stage wouldn't mess him up his development for good, but she didn't have any choice. She wouldn't know where to start creating a suitable challenge for him here in the hive. Instead, she would skip directly to the being greeted by a lusus part.

She stretched out a hand toward the child. "Hello," she said. She wasn't sure if one should speak to children, but then again, one wasn't supposed to interact with them at all. She supposed it couldn't hurt.

The child eyed her suspiciously.

"I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to be your lusus. See?" She pulled out a protein sphere from the box she had prepared and offered it to the child as a gift of good faith. She wasn't sure how the bond between child and lusus was supposed to be formed, but an offer of food was said to work on half-domesticated animals, so why not half-formed trolls?

The child's face perked as he caught the scent of the food, but he was still wary. He tilted his head a bit and stepped clumsily away from the remains of his cocoon, toddling in a circle around her and not leaving her with his eyes.

"I'm not dangerous," the Dolorosa assured him again. He probably didn't understand her yet, but her soft voice did seem to make him relax a bit. "Here." She wriggled the protein sphere and raised her other hand towards him, too. "Please trust me."

Without warning, the child seemed to have come to the decision to do so. He closed the distance between them with a few quick steps on his stubby legs, but didn't stop at the Dolorosa's hand to take the food. Instead he proceeded to the adult troll's lap, throwing his short arms around her and giving her the biggest hug such a small creature could manage.

The Dolorosa wasn't quite sure what to think of that.

***

There were many things about the child that the Dolorosa wasn't sure what to think about. Keeping him hidden turned out to be the easy part. She had chosen the remote hive well, and the outside world never suspected her presence, or the existence of her mutant charge.

But as she discovered, raising a child was more than just keeping him safe and fed. She was doing the unprecedented, treading unknown ground, and there were no maps or manuals. She lacked the natural instinct of a lusus, and time and again the child would make her frustrated, worried and exhausted. It was an alien being to her, small, loud and obnoxious, but also helpless and pitiable.

She had to learn to interpret the insistent yells of a child that didn't yet speak. She had to learn to calm him when he was angry, comfort him when he kept rolling out of his makeshift recuperacoon at night, and get him to listen to her when he was being boisterous. She had to teach him how to use a load gaper – oh Mother Grub, why couldn't that have been instinctual? – and the correct way of eating slope crabs without getting their shells stuck in his teeth.

And yet, despite being much more frustrating than she had imagined, the experience was also more rewarding than she had dared hope. The child turned to her for everything – food, comfort and information, and it was as exiting as it was unnatural to literally be the world to another creature. He would curl up in her lap and she would pet his hair, and since he seemed to like listening to her voice, she would tell him stories of trolls and grubs, wars and Empresses, seadwellers and lowbloods, and he would always listen with eyes open and watchful, even though in the first bilunar cycles he couldn't have understood much. But he would put her arms around her, and she would put hers around him, and there was a happy warmth between them. The Dolorosa definitely wasn't sure what to think about that.

***

She also had to keep him dressed. Typically, a child's build drones would make it a full wardrobe of serviceable clothes in different sizes, all marked with the child's individual sign. The child would start wearing them when it occurred to it to do so. But this child had neither drones nor sign, so unless she wanted him to grow up naked, she had to put some clothes together for him. Her first clumsy attempts were hardly more than putting a couple of cloths together into a simple gown, but as time passed, she grew to enjoy combining patterns, colors and styles into new garments. As she grew to enjoy occupying herself with sewing, she started making clothes for herself as well. She didn't even always incorporate her sign. It was as invigorating as it was blasphemous.

It was a relief to see that the child didn't have any particular predisposition towards the color red. If anything, he preferred blacks and grays, and the Dolorosa was quick to incorporate that in the outfits she made for him. As he grew, she found a style that suited his personality and gave him a certain charismatic anonymity that could only be an asset to him when the time came for him to meet troll society.

***

Less than three bilunar cycles after his wriggling, the child started talking. His first word was a simple "Hello," as he walked up to the Dolorosa from behind while she was preparing a meal by the heat radiator. His voice startled her - it sounded different when it formed a word than when just yelling randomly. It was a high-pitched voice, running on a register far beyond the capabilities of an adult troll, and she found it oddly compelling.

"Hello," she replied, smiling down at him. "You're talking today."

"Yes," he said. "I can do that now. I'm very good." His face split into a wide grin filled with tiny little pointed teeth. The only word she could find to describe it was 'adorable'.

"You _are_ very good," the Dolorosa agreed. She failed to resist the urge to hoist him up into her arms. "You're the _best_."

He laughed happily and asked what she was doing, so she explained to him about the dinner they were going to have later. It was the first time she knew for certain that he listened to her words and not just her voice, and it was a new experience for both of them.

She felt proud of him, although she wasn't sure why. Speech was a natural process that meant the child's thinkpan had matured enough to be able to access the ancestral language lobes, so it shouldn't be something to feel anything in particular about. It simply meant he was growing into less of a wriggler and more of a troll.

However, once she started thinking more about it after dinner, it seemed very early to for him to speak while still in his second cycle. She couldn't remember clearly from her own childhood, but she had the feeling that it would usually take longer than that. Perhaps five bilunar cycles, maybe even six. What if the Dolorosa's presence had affected his thinkpan somehow? What if the way she constantly talked to him had made access the racial memories of language faster – and in that case, at what cost?

It wasn't the first time she felt cold panic rise in her throat, and it wouldn't be the last. She was no lusus. She had no idea what she was doing. How did she know she was doing it right? She could be messing this child's development up in every way, and there would be no way to know until it was too late.

The child snapped her out of her reverie by pulling her sleeve. "Tell me a story," he demanded, smiling hopefully and bouncing on his little toes. She couldn't resist him, and neither did she want to. Taking him over to the relaxationblock, she let him snuggle up to her on a softchair while she told him about the brave warriors of space. She studied his face as she spoke, and her worries dissipated somewhat. He was happy. Whatever the future may bring, right now he was happy and content. She must be doing _something_ right.

***

The child kept growing. She knew in theory at what speed a child matures, and there didn't seem to be anything unusual about it as far as she could tell, but it was still startling to see how quickly he grew and matured and learned and adapted. He turned out to be surprisingly intelligent, as well as possessing an unexpected affinity for discovering the most filthy words in the language and using them whenever he wanted to drive home a point.

Conversing with the child turned out to be another difficulty that the Dolorosa had failed to anticipate. Trolls did not talk to their young. Children were schoolfed by their lususes, given the nourishment they needed to activate the knowledge already hidden within their thinkpans as well as the skills needed to expand on that, primarily the ability to read and write and use a computer grub. The Dolorosa had never considered what it would be like to stand before an almost totally innocent troll that didn't know _anything_ about how the world worked. It was inspiring and intimidating at once. She could have told him anything, and he would have believed her.

But she had a self-assumed responsibility to teach him how to survive. She wouldn't trick him. She had decided from the beginning to schoolfeed him like any lusus would, although she had to make his schoolbrew herself, and she wasn't sure how potent it was. But schoolfeeding was the natural way of learning, and it startled her to realize that the stories she told him had turned into his primary source of information long before he even started on the brew.

He would no longer just listen passively, but start asking questions. "How many trolls are there?" "Where do they live?" "When can I see them?" "When will I grow up?" "How long is a sweep?" "How cold is winter?" There was no end to them. "Why are there stars in the sky?" "Why does sunlight hurt?" "Where do children come from?" She answered to the best of her ability, and he nodded and absorbed and asked more questions.

Once she started schoolfeeding him, starting slowly in his second sweep and upping the dose steadily as he grew, he became somewhat less innocent, but the rain of questions didn't stop. It just became more directed. He would ask her to explain the details of the information he discovered was in his head, making some point or other clearer, confirming or denying his own conclusions. Sometimes he would hold out a hand to stop her, declaring loudly that "that makes no fucking _sense_!" and she'd have to try to re-explain. Occasionally was forced to give him right – there were things that from an objective perspective did make 'no fucking sense', although unfortunately that didn't make them any less true.

And then, once he began to understand how society worked, he would start asking the difficult questions.

"Are you really a lusus?" "If you're an adult, why are you so nice?" "Why do we live so far away from everyone?" "Why don't I have a sign?" She answered him, but she found herself dancing around the point, even though she knew he wouldn't stand for that in the long run. Lying to him was not an option, and he would need to know eventually, but she was scared – terrified – that knowing would crush the little bubble of happiness in which he lived and tear him apart. Perhaps it would be better to wait with that piece of truth until he confronted her with it directly.

She found that she was torn between protecting him now and protecting him in the long run. She couldn't explain that, either.

***

It was shortly after his third wriggling day when he finally did confront her. They were having their regular breakfast of roasted cicadoas and the child was being uncharacteristically quiet at first, as if debating something with himself. In the end, he pushed the bowl away and growled. "I've figured it out," he said.

The Dolorosa sighed inwardly. "Figured out what?" she asked, steeling herself against the answer.

"This." He grabbed one of her hands and scratched a claw across the back of it hard enough to break the skin and trace a thin line of jade green. She didn't protest. It barely hurt, and she decided to let him make the point in his own way. "The hemoscale." He looked up at her. "You're green, high middle class. Even if it was normal for adults to take care of children, which everything I've been schoolfed tells me _never happens_ , you're way too high on the scale to do such a menial shitty thing. It doesn't make sense." His voice – still young enough to operate on notes unreachable for an adult – was trembling slightly.

She nodded. This was it, then. As she didn't say anything, he went on. "I'll tell you what else doesn't make sense." He dropped her hand and scratched the back of his own hand, more violently than he had scratched hers. "This!" He waved the his hand in front of her face, showing her a darkening line of blood pooling forth. "This color isn't even _on_ the grubsucking hemoscale! Why the hell is my blood fucking _candy red_!?"

She clasped his scratched hand in both of hers and told him, this time not holding anything back. She explained that he was a mutant, possessing a blood color that didn't occur naturally in trolls, and that troll society wasn't created to accommodate those who didn't fit with strictly defined categories. Deviants were culled on sight. If anyone ever knew about his blood, his life would be in danger. This was why he had no lusus and no sign, and why they lived so far off.

The child's hand - still so small - shivered. "I thought it would be something grokpoking moronic like that," he grumbled, eyes turned down on his lap, and she could see how his other hand clenched into a fist. "I don't get it though. If I'm that fucking useless and depraved, why am I still alive? Why didn't someone cull me when I was a grub? Why don't you cull me _now_?"

He sounded so small and lost and broken, and watching him, knowing she had done this to him, felt like a stab in the guts. He had asked straight out, and any lie would just have hurt him more, made him unprepared to face reality and robbed him of any chance to survive as an adult, but that didn't make it any easier to see him suffer. He shouldn't have to.

His reaction was everything she had feared it would be, but he was still young, and she was still there to pick up the pieces. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him up in her lap, holding him tight.

"Because you're not," she said. This was the truth, too. "You're not useless and depraved at all. You're _wonderful_. The Imperial regulations are wrong, and you and I are proving that, aren't we? You're not on the hemoscale, but that means you're unique. You're outside the laws, but that means you're not bound by them. You can be anything you want. And I'll be with you all the way."

He sobbed softly against her chest. "Why?" he growled into her dress, almost inaudible, but she heard him nevertheless.

"Because I care about you." She wanted to say more, but she could find no words. Instead, she held him tight as he cried, rocking him softly and reassuring him that she was there and wasn't going to go imperial on him. Eventually he stopped and dried his pale red tears off with a sleeve.

"Thanks," he said and gave her a shaky smile. "The hemoscale sucks."

***

Troll language didn't have a concept of pity – nevermind _love_ – that wasn't inexorably tied to the romantic quadrants. Any strong emotional bond between two trolls was conceptually built on the assumption that both parties were adults and reasonably equal, if not by blood then by grit and fluster. Any strong bond was assumed to be covered by the concept of romance, and anything else was perverse, if not outright unthinkable. A bond between an adult and a child was hard – if not impossible – to understand under such conditions.

The Dolorosa had no words to describe what she felt for her child ( _her_ child – such a strange concept, but she had come to think of him that way), and it confused her.

He kept growing, and learning, and thinking. For every passing sweep, he would become more and more like the adult troll he was destined to turn into, and less and less like the little unfathomable creature that had first emerged from the pupa. She taught him to fight, where to strike and how to dodge, but above all the wisdom to get out without a brawl. She taught him the basics of etiquette and the right ways of approaching officials on the various rungs of troll bureaucracy. They spent long mornings discussing what to do once he was of age - where to go, who to see, what to say. He was excited by this, perhaps even more so by knowing the dangers.

She let him have his first contact with other trolls in his fifth sweep - through the computer grub, of course. The network signal was weak in their remote location, but it was enough for him to chat anonymously once in a while, getting to know other children and gaining a bit of social awareness in a safe setting. She warned him against talking too much about his home life and to never mentioned her in anyway, before letting him go at it. It felt awkward for her, a strange mixture of loneliness and pride, to give him a piece of life she played no part in. It was another of the many feelings she had towards the child that made no sense. But he would tell her of his new friends, and the way their names made him smile or rage was another soft warmth in her heart.

***

He was past his sixth wriggling day when he started having visions. The first time, he had come running to the Dolorosa and woken her up in the middle of day, making her sleepily assume that he had had a bad dream.

"No!" he assured her. "I had the most fucking awesome dream _ever_!"

He had dreamt of a different world. A could-have-been, might-have-been, could-possibly-be world, where things worked differently and life was easy enough that no one ever had to live in fear. At first he was just basking in the glow of the dream, babbling excitedly about how happy everyone had been, and how he had seen her there, and one or two of his network friends, and everyone had been so relaxed and safe and different. He was practically beaming with joy, and his joy was contagious.

As it turned out, the dream wasn't a one-time event. As it reoccurred over and over again, sometimes even when he was awake, he started to make out details and understand how a society like that could hang together. He started to believe that it wasn't just a utopia, but something that was actually possible to accomplish. For the Dolorosa, it was just another small piece of unthinkable in her life, and she found that she believed him. Many sweeps earlier she had risked her life to save a little red grub in the belief that he would one day become something special, and although that had long since stopped to be the reason she stayed with him, she didn't doubt that he had it in him to change the world.

Of course she worried. Troll society was cruel and unforgiving, and by trying to do anything more than just survive in it, he would risk more than just death by culling. But she believed in him, and she would stand by him until the end.

***

When the child was eight sweeps old, and technically no longer a child, they decided together that it was time to leave the hive and touch the world. They had looked at maps and statistics, considered the Dolorosa's old acquaintances and the young troll's network friends, and made plans. They believed they were ready.

"There's one thing, though," the young troll said with as they hiked down the mountain. "If anyone asks about you and me... What do we tell them?"

The Dolorosa shook her head, shrugging helplessly. That was a very good question. They were close enough that no one would believe that they _weren't_ in a romantic quadrant. But no matter how she turned and twisted the matter, it didn't fit. He felt the same way, or he wouldn't have asked. She couldn't have a flushed romance with someone she'd seen grow since he was a grub, since before he could use the load gaper and before he had ever heard of buckets. It was ridiculous. But she couldn't have a pale romance either, not with someone she'd known since before he could speak, since before he had opinions, before he knew anything that she hadn't told him personally. And for him – how could anyone possibly have a romance with a person who had always been there, adult and unchanging, helping one grow up? Their relationship was unnatural and unthinkable, just like his bright red blood. But that meant they were unique.

"Don't tell them anything," she said. "Let them guess."


End file.
